Dredging up the truth

Records show GE was warned about health threats of PCBs decades before anti-dredging campaign

Brendan J. Lyon, Times Union

By Brendan J. Lyons

Updated 11:37 pm, Saturday, March 8, 2014

longtime General Electric CEO Jack Welch always insisted that PCBs are safe — a position he and GE hold to this day, despite widespread scientific consensus to the contrary. (Times Union)
/ Times Union

A view of the former GE plant near the Hudson River on March 25, 2014 in Hudson Falls, NY. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

Empty barrels labeled General Electric insulating oil are seen at a dump site at South Glens Falls Drag strip on July 28, 1982. (Fred McKinney/Times Union archive)

Empty barrels labeled General Electric insulating oil are seen at a...

The Halfmoon Water Treatment Plant Wednesday morning Jan. 22, 2014 in Halfmoon, N.Y., which has been closed due to PCB contamination since March 2010. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union)

The Halfmoon Water Treatment Plant Wednesday morning Jan. 22, 2014...

The pump room of the Halfmoon Water Treatment Plant Wednesday morning Jan. 22, 2014 in Halfmoon, N.Y., which has been closed due to PCB contamination since March 2010. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union)

The pump room of the Halfmoon Water Treatment Plant Wednesday...

General Electric Company has used its Hudson Falls capacitor plant to manage the ongoing effort to dredge tons of PCBs from the Hudson River.
()

General Electric Company has used its Hudson Falls capacitor plant...

General Electric Company and Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. are battling in U.S. District Court over GE's claim that the power company, which removed a dam near this spot in the Hudson River in 1973, should share cleanup costs. GE claims the dam's removal allowed more than a million pounds of PCBs to wash down the river. Niagara Mohawk counters that the dam removal had little to do with GE's decades-long pollution of the Hudson River.
()

General Electric Company and Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. are...

A view of the former GE plant near the Hudson River on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2013 in Hudson Falls, NY. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

A view of the former GE plant near the Hudson River on Wednesday,...

A view of the former GE plant near the Hudson River on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2013 in Hudson Falls, NY. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

A view of the former GE plant near the Hudson River on Wednesday,...

A view of the former GE plant near the Hudson River on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2013 in Hudson Falls, NY. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

A view of the former GE plant near the Hudson River on Wednesday,...

Dr. David Carpenter, director, Institute for Health and the Environment University at Albany poses at his office on Thursday, Feb. 6, 2014 in Rensselaer, NY. On the large drawing pad in the background is a drawing of a PCB molecule. Dr. Carpenter has been studying PCB exposure and the health effects to humans for years. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

Dr. David Carpenter, director, Institute for Health and the...

It's unknown how many millions of pounds of PCBs may have leaked into the Hudson River from General Electric Company's capacitor plant in Hudson Falls.

()

It's unknown how many millions of pounds of PCBs may have leaked...

A crane aboard a barge scoops PCB-laden sediment from the bottom of the Hudson River on Aug. 29, 2013.
()

A crane aboard a barge scoops PCB-laden sediment from the bottom of...

Dr. David Carpenter, director, Institute for Health and the Environment University at Albany poses at his office on Thursday, Feb. 6, 2014 in Rensselaer, NY. On the large drawing pad in the background is a drawing of a PCB molecule. Dr. Carpenter has been studying PCB exposure and the health effects to humans for years. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

Dr. David Carpenter, director, Institute for Health and the...

General Electric Company used railroad cars to help bring in at least 190 million pounds of PCBs to its capacitor plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward between 1946 and 1977, when PCBs were banned from use by the U.S. government.
()

General Electric Company used railroad cars to help bring in at...

The Halfmoon Water Treatment Plant Wednesday morning Jan. 22, 2014 in Halfmoon, N.Y., which has been closed due to PCB contamination since March 2010. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union)

The Halfmoon Water Treatment Plant Wednesday morning Jan. 22, 2014...

A view of the former Hudson Falls GE capacitor plant on the Hudson River Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2013, in Hudson Falls, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

A view of the former Hudson Falls GE capacitor plant on the Hudson...

A view of the former GE plant near the Hudson River on March 25, 2014 in Hudson Falls, NY. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

Barges with backhoes work in the Hudson River just below Lock 7 seen here during a boat tour along the Champlain Canal and the Hudson River to see the PCB dredging process taking place Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011, near Fort Edward, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union archive)

Barges with backhoes work in the Hudson River just below Lock 7...

People on both sides of the dredging issue filled a EPA public hearing meeting Tuesday night, Feb. 6, 2001, at the Marriott in Colonie, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski/Times Union archive)

People on both sides of the dredging issue filled a EPA public...

A view of an anti-dredging sign on the Hudson River Friday, April 12, 2002, in Schuylerville, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz/Times Union archive)

A view of an anti-dredging sign on the Hudson River Friday, April...

Areial showing dredging on the Hudson River near Fort Edward, June 21, 2011. (Gary Gold Photography)

For years, as it fought against being forced to clean up the Hudson River, General Electric Co. argued that an oil-like insulating fluid that had seeped into the river from its Washington County capacitor plants wasn't harmful to humans.

Besides, GE officials said, the river was cleaning itself.

Yet newly uncovered documents reveal that as early as the 1960s — decades before the government ordered GE to undertake the river dredging that is scheduled to resume this spring — company officials were warned of the potential serious health threats of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which their engineers described in confidential memos as "hazardous waste."

The documents also indicate that GE flushed far more PCBs into the river than government regulators have estimated, and that nearly a million pounds a year of additional PCBs were carted away by scavenger crews, dumped with an attitude characterized by a GE engineer in 1970 as "out of sight, out of mind."

While fighting a federally mandated cleanup, the longtime CEO of the company, Jack Welch, always insisted that PCBs are safe — a position he and GE hold to this day, despite scientific evidence to the contrary.

The records were obtained by the Times Union through a series of Freedom of Information Law requests at a critical time: GE has been battling several river communities over who will pay for alternate drinking-water supplies as the corporation mops up the PCB pollution that created a nearly 200-mile environmental disaster from Hudson Falls to the Atlantic Ocean — the nation's largest Superfund site.

The federally mandated dredging of the Upper Hudson is costing GE $1 billion. Taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions more in related cleanup costs, and there are growing calls for GE to participate in funding long-stalled dredging of the Champlain Canal, which also was tainted by PCBs from GE.

The documents raise an unsettling question: Did GE brush off its own employees' assessments of the risk of PCB pollution, later engaging in a lobbying and public relations campaign to change the public's perception of the dangers?

Such questions are reflections on history, rather than current reality, GE spokesmen say.

"The fact is GE acted diligently and responsibly in dealing with PCBs, complied with the law and regulations and has done an exceptional job on the dredging project," said Mark Behan, a GE spokesman.

Misleading the regulators

The Hudson River was dying.

In the fall of 1968, a cadre of environmental specialists from the state Health Department was touring the General Electric Co.'s capacitor plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward to learn more about industrial pollutants that were destroying the river's ecosystem. The federal Clean Water Act was still a few years away, but the state was studying the feasibility of a regional wastewater treatment facility, after decades of allowing GE and other companies to treat the embattled river like their own toxic landfill.

But as they took their tour, the state officials were being lied to about the level of heavy metals leaking into the river from GE's plants.

"We intensionally (sic) omitted some information ... which would have greatly compounded the problem in the eyes of the regulatory people; namely, the state Department of Health authorities," a GE engineer, Kenneth H. Harvey, wrote in an internal memo dated Sept. 21, 1968, a day after the meeting.

Jack Welch, who in 1981 became GE's CEO and one of the world's most celebrated business executives, scowled as he read Harvey's memo during a deposition last year in Palm Beach, Fla.

"This guy's ass should have been fired," Welch said. "The guy that got this memo should have had this guy in and understood what the hell he was doing and why he was doing it. That's not a practice of the General Electric Co. that I knew when I worked there."

The deposition by Welch, 78, his first testimony on GE's handling of PCBs, was never made public. The 300-page transcript and a video of the proceeding were obtained by the Times Union through FOIL requests that also gave the newspaper access to hundreds of internal GE records.

Welch's testimony, and that of numerous current or former GE officials, was compelled by a lawsuit filed against GE five years ago in federal court by the Saratoga County towns of Halfmoon, Stillwater and Waterford, the village of Stillwater, and the Saratoga County Water Authority. The municipal agencies have water systems tied to the Hudson River that they claim were tainted by the ongoing dredging project and the possibly millions of pounds of PCBs that were flushed into the river from GE's capacitor plants over a 30-year period.

The records reviewed by the Times Union include internal GE reports and correspondence on the company's knowledge and handling of PCBs. Despite the unprecedented insight, thousands of other internal company records remain shielded from public disclosure, including scores of documents related to GE's multimillion-dollar public relations campaign in opposition to dredging. GE has argued in federal court that those records are privileged — that is, not subject to disclosure — including communications with Behan, a public-relations strategist and former newspaper editor.

Last week Behan said GE and three of the plaintiffs in the case — the village and town of Stillwater and the town of Waterford — had reached a "settlement in principle." He declined to elaborate.

The case records show that GE began aggressively studying the health and environmental issues related to PCBs more than 40 years ago, and curtailed use in the early 1970s of what it suspected at the time was a more dangerous type of PCBs.

"Suspected carcinogens"

GE opened its Fort Edward manufacturing plant in 1946 and its Hudson Falls plant, a mile up the river, in 1951. For decades, the plants were a backbone of employment in the hardscrabble villages. But the payoff of jobs came with long-term environmental consequences.

According to court records, GE purchased an estimated 190 million pounds of PCBs over a period of decades, using it as a dielectric fluid to insulate its capacitors from overheating. PCBs, a coal-tar byproduct, were for many years the government's preferred chemical for that purpose, in part because they were effective at preventing fires while not interfering with conductivity.

But in 1979, amid growing evidence that PCBs may cause cancer and other serious health problems, they were banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Much of the Hudson River's pollution occurred when PCBs were spilled onto the ground and seeped into the bedrock below the factories. They were also flushed into the capacitor plants' wastewater systems, which poured into the nearby river.

GE officials have repeatedly insisted that the company never broke any environmental laws and its toxic discharges were "permitted." In fact, there was no government permitting system for most of the period that PCBs were in use. Legal opponents of GE assert that under the federal Refuse Act, hazardous discharges to a waterway were illegal, and that the company violated state and federal permits that were required beginning in the 1970s.

No one can accurately say how many pounds of PCBs ended up in the Hudson River or the bedrock under GE's capacitor plants. A GE spokesman said the company "has not issued an estimate of the volume of PCBs that were discharged to the river."

For more than a decade, the EPA has said 1.3 million pounds of PCBs entered the river, but even the EPA cannot say where that figure originated.

"That's one we've generally been using," said David King, director of the EPA's Hudson River field office in Fort Edward. "I wouldn't say it's irrelevant but it's nothing that can be quantified with any real accuracy."

Kenneth R. Murphy, an engineer who worked in GE's environmental pollution control division in Schenectady, wrote an analysis of the potential environmental damage in June 1970. His report came as other internal records show the company was becoming increasingly aware of the environmental dangers of PCBs. Murphy warned that controlling the company's PCB waste stream would be a "major undertaking" and estimated that GE annually discharged about 500,000 pounds of PCBs "directly to bodies of water."

"The Hudson River has been the major receiving stream," he wrote in his report, which was widely distributed inside the company but never made public.

Each year, an additional 900,000 pounds of PCB waste was being taken away by contractors — "scavengers who dispose of it in an 'out of sight, out of mind' manner," Murphy wrote. "Few, if any, scavengers give consideration to proper disposal of hazardous wastes," he added.

Murphy's report estimated that another 100,000 pounds of PCB-contaminated waste was sent each year to landfills, yet "there is no indication that any consideration was given to the handling of hazardous wastes in these landfills."

In a recent interview, Murphy, now 73 and living in Virginia, didn't back away from his 1970 report. But he cautioned that he used data "more from manufacturing people, some of them with limited education and not chemists or chemical engineers."

"I just compiled data that was given to me," said Murphy, who worked at GE for 23 years. "I think the company wanted to understand the size of the problem."

By the time Murphy's report was issued, the company was aware of the potential environmental risks of PCBs. A month earlier, GE had sent a letter to its utility customers warning that PCBs, which it referred to as "Pyranol," a GE trademark, were "a matter of growing concern as to their effect on some species of wildlife."

The May 1970 letter noted that Monsanto Company, which was the only U.S. manufacturer of PCBs and sounded the alarm on the concerns, "has been reviewing procedures to be sure that these materials do not find their way into land or water environment."

There are other records outlining GE's early concerns about PCBs. In October 1969, about eight months after a California newspaper reported on a "menacing new pollutant" causing problems for marine life and birds in San Francisco Bay, a product-safety engineer at GE's Schenectady headquarters wrote a memo documenting concerns about the ecological effects and toxic hazards of PCBs. The memo, sent to a high-ranking GE engineer, cited troubling reports by Monsanto and newspaper stories noting their "hormone destroying activity" and similarities to insecticides like DDT.

"The broad class of materials we are dealing with here ... contains known or suspected carcinogens," the engineer, James S. Nelson, wrote in a six-page report.

Nelson's report said GE's "largest user" of PCBs was the Industrial and Power Capacitor Department at Hudson Falls.

In 1976, GE prepared another internal report, also never made public, that included the headline: "The Problem." The report said the industry-wide use of PCBs in 1975 was about 13 million pounds, "of which 5.6 million pounds — about 45 percent of industry usage — were used by the Department at Hudson Falls and Fort Edward ... PCBs have been of environmental concern since the late 1960s."

"Gun to your head"

Welch was at the helm when GE began battling the EPA and the state of New York in the 1970s, leading to a two-decades-long debate over the toxicity of PCBs and the effectiveness of dredging. GE vehemently opposed dredging, citing the high cost, potential ecological damage to the river, and the lack of assurances that the plan would work.

Welch holds a doctorate in chemical engineering and, after joining GE at age 24, became vice president of its chemical division in 1973 before his meteoric rise through the company's ranks. During his 20-year tenure as CEO, he was credited with turning GE into one of the world's most profitable companies. But his success was dogged by GE's pollution history, especially the Hudson River.

Welch became personally involved in the company's battle with regulators over PCBs years before he took over the company. He has recounted an incident from December of 1975, when he learned that the state Department of Environmental Conservation was holding a hearing on GE's pollution of the Hudson River, and drove to Albany from his office in Pittsfield, Mass. He said he sat incognito in the back of the hearing room, growing concerned as he watched a GE-hired biologist "coming unglued" as he appeared before regulators.

"He lacked credibility," Welch said in his deposition.

As a result, Welch took over leadership of the PCB battle. Months later, in the spring of 1976, Welch negotiated a settlement with the state of New York that released GE from state liability for the PCB pollution.

The deal called for GE to pay $3 million for monitoring the river's PCB pollution, and $1 million for research.

During his deposition last March, Welch was shown an internal company memo from April 1975.

The memo was attributed to James C. Herger, who was human resources and labor relations director at the Washington County plants in 1975, reporting to the plants' general manager, Lucas Hart. The document, carrying a header from GE's Capacitor Products Department in Hudson Falls, was stamped "strictly private."

"We are again rapidly slipping into a lethargic state of mind concerning our environmental affairs," Herger wrote. "We need to make several changes to abate the discharge of PCBs in kerosines." He also described the company's "lack of priority for environmental projects" and warned that GE's continued violation of an EPA discharge permit "could result in the shutdown of our business."

At the time Welch, a vice president, oversaw the capacitor division as part of his wide-reaching duties. He said last year, though, that he'd never seen Herger's memo and doesn't remember him.

"This fellow thinks we should have had environmental projects at the top of the priorities," Welch said. "I don't know what happened here."

At GE's request, the Herger memo, like thousands of other internal company documents, remains sealed under a court order.

Herger, 75, who left GE in 1979 and lives in Silver Spring, Md., said he met and spoke with Welch on occasion but could not recall writing the memo that's attributed to him in GE's files.

"That strikes me as a suicide note for anybody who works for that company," Herger said in a telephone interview. "Even if I had those concerns, I would not express it like that. ... Why would I have written that letter? That's the equivalent of putting a gun to your head to be an employee (of GE) and write that kind of letter."

Hiring the enemy

In 2004, four years before she became GE's vice president of corporate environmental programs, Ann R. Klee sat before a U.S. Senate environmental committee to make her pitch for confirmation as the EPA's general counsel. Klee was nominated for the position by President George W. Bush, and brought a wealth of legal talent and experience, including several years as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill.

Klee recounted "my most significant case, and certainly one of the highlights of my career" for the Senate panel. In 1990, she said, she had represented the city of Delray Beach, Fla., which had been forced to shut down its public drinking water system due to industrial pollution.

"We were able to identify the source of the contamination — a company that had been dumping used solvents on its property for years — and obtain an $8.7 million verdict ... on behalf of the city for cleanup costs and future operation and maintenance of the treatment structures," Klee told the panel, according to a copy of her statement.

In February 2008, after Klee left the EPA, GE hired her as its vice president of corporate environmental programs. Her job, in part, is overseeing management and clean-up of GE's polluted sites around the country, including the Hudson River. Klee said in a deposition two years ago that she doesn't know if her connections at the EPA were a factor in GE's decision to hire her.

At GE, Klee succeeded Stephen D. Ramsey, who was the Justice Department's environmental enforcement chief before GE hired him in 1990.

Attorneys for the river communities that sued GE have suggested in court filings that GE deliberately hired attorneys like Ramsey and Klee in part due to their government connections. They also have accused GE of plugging attorneys into key corporate positions so their work is categorized as legal advice to a client and thus won't be subject to public disclosure.

More than 20 years ago, at the height of GE's fight against dredging, the company also hired M. Peter Lanahan, a former deputy commissioner in New York's Department of Environmental Conservation. Lanahan was GE's manager of the Hudson River project and personally made presentations to his former agency on behalf of GE, records show.

"Pete was an asset to the company because ... he had great relationships throughout state government, and he was a good project manager," Ramsey said in a deposition. Welch denied that GE was looking to cash in on its executives' government connections.

"We were looking for people that had experience with the agency that they would be dealing with," Welch testified.

"No adverse health effects"

In October 2010, a year after dredging began, the project was suspended so the EPA and GE could evaluate issues that occurred that first year. A major problem was that dredging stirred up more PCBs than predicted. On at least 10 occasions the levels in the upper Hudson River, above the Troy dam, exceeded the 500 parts-per-trillion threshold set by the EPA.

As the negotiations unfolded, Klee wrote an email to the EPA and the Justice Department requesting that documents and charts used in their discussions be kept secret and not made subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The federal agencies declined the request.

"My concern was that if the documents that we exchanged in those discussions were produced in response to a FOIA request, it would be much harder for the parties to engage in an open and honest discussion," Klee testified at a September 2012 deposition in Boston.When dredging resumed, GE and the EPA had agreed to looser rules. Under the new standards, warnings were made to public water suppliers only if the 500 ppt threshold was breached at Rhinebeck — some 60 miles south of the Troy Dam.

The town of Waterford shut down its water treatment plant in 2009 when dredging started. Halfmoon, which opened a $12 million water plant along the river in 2003, kept pumping water from the river but had to turn its plant off repeatedly the first year of dredging.

In March 2010, when there was no dredging, PCB levels in the upper Hudson River spiked to 2,000 ppt, prompting Halfmoon to shut down its plant. It has not used water from the Hudson River since then.

During her 2012 deposition, Klee repeatedly said it's her "understanding" there are "no adverse health effects associated with PCBs." That view conflicts with the stance of her former employer, EPA, which considered PCBs a possible human carcinogen in the 1970s. In the 1990s, the EPA amended its position and said that PCBs are a "probable" human carcinogen.

"It's not part of my responsibility to be a PCB scientist," Klee said, when asked if she'd read reports on PCBs other than those commissioned by GE.

Welch also doesn't believe PCBs have harmful health effects, despite scientific evidence that they may. Much of his position on that, he said, comes from studies that GE commissioned as early as 1976, in which the health trends of its factory workers were studied by scientists.

Last spring, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which first warned of PCBs' adverse health effects in 1978, declared that certain PCBs, including the type flushed into the river by GE, "have reproductive, toxic, and carcinogenic consequences." The EPA, based on past practice, is expected to adopt that finding once the World Health Organization adopts it.

"EPA," Welch scoffed, waving his hand dismissively during his deposition last year. "I was completely satisfied as to the safety of PCBs. In my time I studied it. I looked at it. I made my judgment and I was completely satisfied. ... I haven't seen any PCB studies that convince me there was another side to it."

But the studies that Welch cites have drawn scientists' questions. In one study commissioned by GE, scientists examined the health patterns of workers at the Washington County capacitor plants and determined that they had a lower rate of cancer than the general population.

"It followed people for only five years ... (and) included all the secretaries, all the people that weren't anywhere near where the PCBs were," said Dr. David O. Carpenter, who has studied PCBs for decades.

"The point about those studies is they were included in the review by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, along with all of the other studies, many of them occupational, and they were found to be unconvincing," said Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany. "The issue is that in addition to cancer, we now have such strong evidence that PCBs alter a large number of other organ systems. PCBs affect the brain and reduce learning ability. This has been demonstrated repeatedly in children exposed to PCBs, often exposed even before birth where they get PCBs from their mother's body and from breast milk."

Learning and memory functions also diminish for adults exposed to PCBs, Carpenter said. He added that some scientists suspect PCBs cause adverse effects to the thyroid glands and health risks that include diabetes, high blood pressure and effects on human reproductive systems.

"PCBs are very dangerous chemicals and anybody that says they are not dangerous simply is not telling the truth, or just does not know what studies have been done," Carpenter said.

Behan, GE's spokesman, questioned Carpenter's credibility.

"Judges in three states have found David Carpenter's opinions too unreliable for a jury to consider as evidence," Behan wrote in an email. "Given this, the Times Union is obliged to re-evaluate whether he is truly qualified to render an opinion on GE's views."

Carpenter, who was retained as an expert witness by the Saratoga County river communities suing GE, has testified in numerous other cases involving PCBs' health effects. He is the founder of the state's School of Public Health and was a member of the World Health Organization panel that last year declared PCBs are a human carcinogen. Carpenter said any compensation he receives as an expert witness is donated to the university's research program.

But not all researchers agree on the dangers of PCBs.

Paul Stewart, a PCB researcher at the State University of New York at Oswego, said the effects on the brain may not be as significant as once believed.

"I tend to see the possible effects of PCBs are far less important than I did when I started this research in 1990s and early 2000s," Stewart said. "The correlations between PCBs and cognitive development are small, even under carefully controlled conditions."

"Alter perception on PCBs"

The alarm sounded at GE in 1990 when the EPA said it was reconsidering its 1984 decision to delay dredging of the river. The federal agency noted mounting evidence that PCBs were a health concern and improvements it said were made in dredging techniques.

On Jan. 17, 1991, an internal team at GE drafted a detailed, confidential plan to take on the EPA.

The 67-page report outlined plans to mount a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign that included a strategy to "establish an intelligence network at regulatory agencies," influence media outlets, and use connections to pressure regulators and elected leaders at all levels of government.

The document, which was stamped "privileged," said the strategy was to "alter perception on PCBs and dredging" and "change regulatory treatment of PCBs."

It highlighted "positive issues" that would be a point of focus, including GE's stated position that PCBs in the Hudson River were becoming "less toxic" through "natural processes" and that "PCBs are overregulated because risk is overstated."

The "basic message," the document states, is that PCBs' "cancer potency factors" were overestimated and that they biodegrade naturally, and are therefore less toxic — notions many scientists dispute. Also, GE would take the position that "neurotoxic effects in children are not attributable to PCBs."

"What GE did was to hire scientists ... who would give GE whatever answer they wanted," said Carpenter, who was previously director of the state Health Department's Wadsworth Center for Laboratories and Research.

Carpenter said the company is correct that anaerobic bacteria remove some chlorine from the PCB molecules. But he said it doesn't destroy or reduce the PCBs. Carpenter reviewed a copy of GE's 1991 strategy report at the request of the Times Union. He pronounced it "full of lies."

"It outlines and shows an intentional strategy to deceive both the government agencies and the general public," he said. "Natural processes in the river were not creating less toxic forms of PCBs, but rather more water soluble and volatile forms that are more toxic for at least some health outcomes."

Behan challenged Carpenter's assessment and said GE's dredging of the river is serving as a national model.

"We simply disagree with his view," Behan said. "That doesn't make anything we've said misleading. We have a disagreement in principle about how he views this issue. ... GE's view is based on the research on the impact of PCBs that have been conducted on the GE workers. It's a view that's based on the interpretation of the science."

Behan also said the debate over the health effects of PCBs "is moot at this point. That ended more than a decade ago. The Hudson River dredging project is now 70 percent complete."

Still, the strategy outline raises questions about whether the company's position on the health effects of PCBs was based on business interests.

Under a section titled "Human Health Effects," the report acknowledges that even if GE could show there were inconclusive cancer studies on PCBs, there was an emerging "new area of concern" on the "neurotoxicological effects" of PCBs. The report mentioned studies showing "minor developmental deficiencies in children of mothers having PCB and other environmental contaminants."

The political targets of GE's campaign included then-Gov. Mario Cuomo, the heads of various state agencies, the EPA, the White House, members of Congress and elected officials from river towns.

On a local level, GE sought to recruit "permanent allies in most local governments above Troy," so the report listed key communities, including those in Saratoga, Washington and Warren counties. In many cases, the plan worked, and local officials initially rallied against dredging.

But whether some public officials understood the implications of their opposition to dredging is questionable.

In June 2012, Stillwater village Mayor Ernest W. Martin Sr. was questioned by a GE attorney as part of the village's lawsuit seeking $12 million for what Martin said was the cost of switching the village water system from a series of underground wells next to the river to a pipeline operated by the county water authority.

The attorney pressed Martin about letters he had written, and public statements he had made, opposing dredging and stating his belief the river was "cleaning itself."

"Well, at the time, it was out there that the river was cleaning itself and the fish and the plant life was all coming back," he testified. "And I was afraid if they stirred up the PCBs, it would just disrupt everything that's going on by cleaning itself."

Martin couldn't cite any report, scientific study or other written materials that led him to oppose dredging. "Common sense," he finally said.

The federal government disagreed.

"Looks can be deceiving," states an EPA web page on the Hudson River's PCB pollution, last updated in 2010. "Yes, the Hudson River looks clean and is teeming with fish. But, the fish and the river bottom on which they depend for food and shelter are contaminated by PCBs. ... The river is not cleaning itself. The PCBs are not safely buried in the sediment. They continue to move as the river flows and each day add to the pollution of the river."

Join reporter Brendan Lyons for a live chat about this project at 4 p.m. Monday at timesunion.com.

About this article

In August 2013, the Times Union's Brendan J. Lyons, a senior writer, and J. Robert Port, a former senior editor for investigations, began a months-long examination of General Electric Co.'s history of pollution in the Hudson River. Their efforts included interviewing current and former GE employees and reviewing thousands of documents from court cases, scientific studies and public records dating back more than 40 years. A series of Freedom of Information Law requests also gave the newspaper access to hundreds of GE's internal records, which were shared through pre-trial disclosures with attorneys for several communities along the upper Hudson River that sued GE in 2009 for contaminating their water supplies.